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Where does the inspiration come from ?

Be yourself; Everyone else is already taken.
— Oscar Wilde.

The idea makes shape

Hi there, my name is Brian Cuppen and I introduce with great pride (together with my teammate Sietse Didden) our food Blog !

But no, this is not your average friendly neighbourhood blog, here you’ll get blown away by our abstract way of looking to cooking.Since I’ve warned you why you still hesitate to read our juicy blogs? Let me explain…

Knowing how to cook your favorite meal is a great advantage in life. But that is where it also ends, their is no urge to try out new meals that may be even better than your average warmed up in the microwave buffet.

In this society the hard working family does not have a breath to make an organised meal, nor the time to eat together with the whole family. We may be fast food eaters but the habit or the custom to eat together is simply dying. The percentage of snacks greatly increased troughout decennia and as a snack fan I dont see a problem but actually we Europeans are starting to look like Americans ! (body size ofcourse)

Is there anymore hesitation ? Well just read it out !

Cinema snacks

Afbeeldingsresultaat voor popcorn in cinema — Crunch Crunch Crunch

Everyone knows that cinema snacks are overpriced, and the thrifty among us may like to sneak in a sweet treat or two to avoid the steep prices. But these smuggled snacks may be overstepping the boundaries of what’s acceptable to take into the cinema. From hot chicken noodle soup to a whole watermelon, these are the most outlandish foods that people have ever snuck into a movie theatre.

Genius, or over the top? This woman sneaked in a hot bowl of chicken noodle soup into the cinema so she could enjoy her dinner while watching a film on the big screen

This woman had a great idea of enjoying her dinner while watching a movie. So what else to do but to take hot chickensoup into a theater.

These girls strapped watermelons to their stomachs so that they looked as if they were pregnant so they could munch on their favourite fruit while watching a movie at the cinema… call me mad but these people are living in 2090.

Last year, Great British Bake Off contestant Tom Gilliford was mocked on social media for saying that fancy French herby bread fougasse was his favourite cinema snack. Well guess what, he proved the mockery wrong and tweeted pictures of themselves sneaking the French herby bread into the theater.

After he left the show, Tom and his wife Kate then tweeted pictures of themselves enjoying the bread at the cinema

My opinion on this is that it’s really wrong to eat loud foods in a theater, but then again the theaters themselves serve loud foods. The theaters can’t complain either that people smuggle stuff in since they sell their product with 60% profit or more depending on the theater you go to it can even run up to an amazing 150% profit ontop of the 100% they paid for it. So keep it going people, I like that we aren’t buying cinema products anymore.

Shiro Miso Ramen

Speaking of a foodblog without recipies ?? Guess I’ll change that…

I like the Japanese culture but what I like more is food, especially when it’s delicious ! Therefore I hereby introduce my version on Shiro Miso Ramen:

Ingredients

noodles (= ramen)
2 eggs
Miso (shiro)
Vegetables like green onions, normal onions,celery or bean sprouts
optional: meat, chicken or tofu
Dashi (normal instant dashi)
soy sauce

Preparation

Your first step is to boil 2 eggs until they’re cooked. After you’ve let them cool down peel the shell of.

Then you cook the vegetables you’ve chosen, in my case after I’ve chopped the onions and celery I’ll get it cooked in a small pan filled with reasonable amount of water together with maize.

Variety of chopped vegetables is the start of a healthy life !

Don’t forget that you’ll have to cook the noodles in a different and bigger pan.(also in water) The noodles aren’t going to take a lot of time, so it’s better to cook it at the same time as you’ll start cooking your vegetables. When they’re cooked you’ll have to cool them down with cold water.

Since you’ve used a big pan to cook the noodles we’ll compensate the content by letting water slowly boil with the instant dashi and soy sauce. The amount of water you’ll cook depends on the number of consumers. After not more than five minutes you’ll have to take off the heat and stir in the miso soup. ( taste the soup and put more tablespoons of miso if necessary) Then you’l have to take a bowl and add the miso soup. Not until its full because your noodles and vegetables will go in it too.

If you like other tastes you could also add meat. It would be convenient to take tender meat so that it’s chewable. Even if you don’t like meat you can add tofu or spinach in your bowl instead of meat.

i hope it tastes well and that you’l hereby know something of the Japanese culture.

How do I make rainbow spaghetti?

Wise quote: ‘You can’t complain about colors when you can’t see them. Just be colorblind like me’ by Sietse Didden

Have you ever thought what it would look like when a unicorn threw up spaghetti? Well me neither , but here we are making rainbow spaghetti… Welcome to the blog this is a recipe I use for rainbow spaghetti.

First what you will need is a chosen amount of ziploc bags equal to your amount of colors.

1 lb. spaghetti, cooked

Food coloring (choose amount)

1 c. Water, Divided

3 tbsp. butter, melted

1/3 c. freshly grated Parmesan

kosher salt

Freshly ground black pepper

Now to actually make the spaghetti you’ll first have to put 2 tablespoons of water into each bag. After this at 10 drops of gel food coloring to them. Devide your spaghetti into your chosen amount of bags and shake it nice and easy until the spaghetti has the color of your coloring in the bag.

Take each spaghetti out of the bag separately and rinse them with cold water. Combine all the spaghetti in a bowl and proceed to toss it with parmesan and butter. Then season it with pepper or whatever it is you want to season it with. And your done, this takes me about 20 min to make.

I hope yours worked as good as mine and keep color in your life.

The paradox of cooking shows

Cooking shows, you’ve seen ’em. Millions of people look at them, from classic home made meals to cooking competitions for a lot of money. Society sure made it a lot harder for chefs to make their dish.

Cooking shows give you only 2 impressions, that the dish tastes wonderful and that it is so easy to make. From the opposite point of view you would say that the dish tastes awful and will kill hours of time. In addition when the chef takes ingredients and says how you’ll have to chop them he or she only cuts one ingredient sets the rest back where it belongs and brings out the other stuff that he chopped earlier. Same goes for when the chef puts something in the oven, apparently there is already a duplicate that has been baked perfectly. This is not very noticeable and happens in each cooking show.

I understand that this is used to kill time so that in the program it looks made in 20 minutes but people often forget that in reality you’re not an experienced chef and that chopping onions might take longer than 5 seconds.

So cooking may look easier than it is, evidently people still get convinced when the popular chef says its easy to make. With people I mean billions of people.

The variations of cooking shows is something we shouldn’t underestimate. The influences from those actually triggers us to give much information about ourselves. An example is that female watchers often look female chefs rather than male chefs. This stereotype creates a paradox between male and female chefs. Not to mention that a number of cooking competitions lines up candidates just to see them fail under pressure only to gain viewing figures.

personal opinion

I think that cooking shows should be more rational and realistic in a way that it doesn’t affect the mind of the viewer. With realistic I do not mean cooking in a home to make a realistic ambiance or to make meals that even a grandmother can make but to just give reasonable numbers or achievable dishes.

Food, a weapon?

Part of the secret of a success in life is to eat what you like and let the food fight it out inside.
Mark Twain

Is food a weapon? Is there really a 50 cal shooting burger? Is this a serious post? Yes,no and yes. In this blogpost I’m going to talk about why food is a weapon. I apologize in advance that none of the food is a burger shooting bullets.

The fact that food was a weapon was realized long ago in the time that the Romans ate the entire Mediterranean for breakfast. The Romans always had impressive tactics that made them superior in battles but the least known and most important was there food tactics. You see the Romans realized that an enemy without food wasn’t an enemy, they were free kills. The Romans kept expanding taking more land, producing more food,defending their own food and so on.

After the Romans only America used food as a weapon on purpose. The westward expansion of America in the nineteenth century was about food and the means to move it, as was Japan’s expanding empire in the early twentieth century. Germany explicitly cited food production to justify its aggression in the east. Saying that America also traded the Soviets food and also traded England food so they could resist the Nazi’s.

History and cold calculation suggest food would be a weapon in a Civil War II, one of many, but of prime importance long term. Civil wars have long gestations, go kinetic suddenly and get complicated in a hurry. Food is the indispensable survival prep. At minimum this means a secure long-term stash of high calorie food sufficient to outlast the initial violence and privation without relying on resupply.

Afbeeldingsresultaat voor baguette gun — Hon Hon Hon

If you were to count beer as food than America takes the lead with another move. Back in the 1900’s America had a real alcohol problem. They could not get their people to stop drinking, so as any normal nation would, they poisoned the alcohol and people started dying because of it. This actually worked and America got rid of the drinking problem with no one being wiser about their actions.

So I think we can safely assume that food is a weapon and that is can be the cruelest weapon of them all.

eat or be eaten ?

no, we’re not here to talk about you silly.

Going back to the old days, our ancestors had it really tough. The constant fear of being devoured by predators and the urge of keep ourselves save and warm somehow brought us to the most colonizing species in the world we named earth.

”It’s better to revalue history than to rewrite future.”
Brian Cuppen

Let me begin from the begin : dinosaurs. Their brain capacity had only to do two things : get food for my body and stay alive in this ecosystem . But Scientist of the university of South Carolina concluded that dinosaurs didn’t adjusted to the way of surviving but that they were planned to evolve in such way that dinosaurs could even possibly be a real opponent against the homo sapiens.

Since the dinosaurs got extinct before we could say more about it’s eating habits is this all we can say.

History tells us that the tables turned around the time of the Homo Habilis. By defending ourselves against predators with home made weapons and giving us the possibility to eat food that was harder to get, we immediately got promoted a couple of steps further up in the food chain. Fire, a gift from the gods or a punishment for our rapid evolve, either way we did make good use of it. As our control of this never ending light grew so did our might and power in the food chain.

Not only did food help us evolve, it made us discover new aspect of life. But most of all food gave us the capability to grow our culture. Food brings together humans to initiate in a various of traditions. The impact of food isn’t only on human scale, it has changed the world !

Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving, one of the most celebrated holydays in America. This is celebrated on the last thursday of november. Despite originating as a harvest festival, Thanksgiving is now celebrated more generally as a day for giving thanks for perceived blessings. Although the United States is the country most commonly linked to the holiday, Thanksgiving Day is also celebrated in Canada on the second Monday of October.

The Pilgrims (people who immagrated from Europe into the New World) were celebrating their first harvest in the New World and marked the occasion with a lavish three-day feast, which was attended by both Pilgrims and Native Americans. Although the European colonies didn’t treat the native Americans well, they set aside specific days for giving thanks to God for their blessings. The Native Americans on the other hand experienced this as a period of suffering. They don’t celebrate Thanksgiving and see it as a period of pain.

If you think of Thanksgiving the first thing everyone says is : Turkey !

But why we link turkey to Thanksgiving ? Well it isn’t only because the first pilgrims did it. Actually there were plenty of turkey in the Playmouth area so it was only logical to eat this delicious good looking and tasty turkeys.

In addition turkeys were the perfect meat choice because they are big and can easily feed a hungry family. Due to popular books, the value of turkey began to have it’s weight and was permanently associated with thanksgiving. Although nobody really knows how the turkey made his entrance, I can tell you with 100% assurance no one saw it gobble-ling !

Personal opinion

As for myself, (Brian) I genuinely thought that such feasts are just a day to spend more money on food and search your limit of being food container. Now that I get the maening of a feast I came to one question, ‘Why it has to be celebrated with a big meal?’. In other words does have food an actual meaning in such feast ?

Thanksgiving (exemple) is to say thanks to your loved ones but it bothers me that the whole world stuffs up food as a treat because you thanked them.

The cooking hypothesis

Everyone knows that humans are further evolved than other animals (as far as we discovered) but do you also know why we are this evolved?

Well, in this blogpost were going to talk about exactly that. In 1990 RIchard Wrangham discovered that around 1.6 million to 1.8 million years ago the brain of the homo erectus started growing rapidly compared to before. It is suspected or almost confirmed that this is the effect of the human species learning to cook.

So we learned how to cook meat and such above fires? No not necessarily , cooking can mean different things like for example crushing, storing/saving, and other methods. I’m not saying they didn’t use fires and cooked meat but ashes of 1.8 milion years ago haven’t been found yet so we can’t prove it is the case but neither can we prove that it isn’t.

Now what did cooking do for the homo erectus? Well for example a gorilla eats for 80% of the day, we used around 20% which meant we had more time to think about culture and our surroundings and our communications and so on. What ended up happening was a rapid growth of our species that happened so fast that mother Earth couln’d even keep up and we got ontop of the foodchain.

And now from the cooking homo erectus that got our species a huge headstart we evolved into homo sapiens that cooks for pleasure and loves eating not for the purpose of it necessarily but for the taste and the enjoyment.

Thanks for reading,

T’ill next time